Practical Web Technologies

18.4. Designing database applications with PHP (I)

18.4.1. Using PHP on databases

Starting out as a Personal Home Page tool in 1995, PHP is now a widely used scripting language on the Web. It is believed that more than 5 million sites use PHP as their scripting language on the Internet (see www.php.net).

As a CGI scripting language, PHP can do everything that other CGI programs can do. Also, like ASP, PHP is an HTML/XHTML embedding language so that PHP statements can be integrated within XHTML pages. Perhaps the most important reason for its success is the support of a wide range of databases. PHP has built-in functions directly supporting the databases listed in Table 18.4.

Table 18.4. Databases directly supported by PHP

Adabas D

Informix

MySQL ...